[svlug] usb device automounting on linux

[Joe Brenner]

I frequently upload photos off of digital cameras over usb these days,
typically by running "gphoto2 -P" from the command line, sometimes
using the "import" feature inside of "gthumb".  This works on both my
workstation (kubuntu on a dual-opteron box) and on my laptop (a harddrive
install of knoppix running on a turion -- note: that's a 32bit linux
kernel, under-utilizing a 64bit chip).

Around half-a-year ago I needed to copy some files off of someone else's
audio player gadget, and after a little research I figured out that all
that I needed to do was this (working on my knoppix laptop):

  mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbflash

(Note: I'm a long-time fan of icewm, so I'm not using some desktop where
one expects an icon to magically appear when a device is attached.)

So, anyway I figured that I knew how to deal with the usb system, and
since those days I haven't changed anything that I remember... but now 
I'm trying to do similar things with other usb devices, but I find that
when I plug one in and do a

  sudo fdisk -l 

I'm not seeing anything that looks like a usb gadget pretending it's a
scsi device.  On the other hand, the usb stuff is clearly working (you
can see this via lsusb, looking at /proc/bus/usb/devices, checking
dmesg, and so on... and for that matter: I can upload digital photos, the
usb system *has* to be working).

And this is the case under *both* knoppix and kubuntu.

So: any clues as to what's going on here?  

Pointers to write-ups on how linux usb automount stuff *really* works
these days will be greatly appreciated (I'm afraid google searches are
getting progressively less useful, for various reasons).

I have found these webpages, which look like they've got at least some
real information:

  http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/stirling/computergeek/usb.html
  http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html